Sunday, July 22, 2012

Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)

Alexander Cockburn, a sharp-witted journalist and unapolo­getic
provocateur of the left who brought a hard-nosed intensity to his
political columns in the Nation, the Village Voice and other outlets,
died July 21 at a medical clinic near Frankfurt, Germany. He was 71.

[...]

In 1987, writer David Rieff reviewed Mr. Cockburn’s book “Corruptions
of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era” in the Times Literary
Supplement, calling it “a mass of bile and invective, some of it
tremendously funny and some of it monumentally ill-judged...The American political scene is immensely enlivened, and I think improved, by his presence in it.”